LotFP House Rules 2: One-Shot this Weekend

As I mentioned recently, I've been thinking of running a small adventure using the LotFP rules. Well, the thinking has becoming doing now, so here are the house rules we'll be using. Note that, for the sake of simplicity in this one-shot, I've not messed around with any of the classes.

Classes

• Humans only.
• Clerics are witch-hunters or crusaders.

Skills
Some additional skills. All characters have a base 1 in 6 chance of success. Specialists can add extra skill points as usual.

• Medicine: identify herbs*, spend one turn with first aid kit (counts as specialist's tools, 10 uses) to heal 1d3 hp of freshly accrued damage. The skill can only be used for healing if the patient has at least half of his maximum hit points.
• Arcane dabbling: use wands & scrolls. If the skill roll fails, the item is used (scroll destroyed, wand charge used) with no effect. If the skill roll fails with a 6 (or double 6), the item backfires, creating a detrimental effect (sometimes the opposite to what was intended).
• Sense magic: spend one turn to detect whether a single object, creature or 10' square area is magical. Further turns may be spent to determine the following things, in order: the type of magic, its potency (approximate spell level), the age of the enchantment.

*Bushcraft can also be used to identify herbs.

LotFP House Rules

Following my purchase of the Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy RPG (reviewed here), I have of course been thinking about what kind of game I would run with it at some point.

The main idea that's popped into my head is to run some games in the Wormwood campaign setting that Greg Gorgonmilk and I are working on (and which is planned for publication at some point). Wormwood is still in development, so its final form is still in flux, but it's shaping up to be a creepy, quirky, pseudo early modern period fairytale setting, which seems perfect for some LotFP-style adventures!

Like any DM worth his salt, I have thus -- as first order of the day! -- been thinking up some house rule tweaks to emphasize the desired tone.

Towit:

More Skills
The LotFP skills system is just begging to be expanded with a few setting-specific additions. I'm thinking about:

• Medicine: identify herbs, minor healing capability.
• Arcane dabbling: use wands & scrolls. Chance of things going badly wrong if the skill roll fails.*
• Sense magic: spend one turn to detect whether a single object, creature or 10' square area is enchanted.
• Appraisal: accurately value treasures.
• Lore: know stuff about history or legend.
• (Maybe) Performance: influence people by making beautiful music, telling gripping tales, dancing like a sylph, etc.

(The latter two were inspired by Beedo's post about an LotFP bard / skald.)

* Note that all characters would thus have a 1 in 6 chance of being able to read the magic words on a scroll and unleash the arcane energies locked within. For your average adventurer this would, of course, be highly risky though, and probably only a last resort.

Class Cuts?
I would run the setting human-only, so that cuts out the dwarf, elf and halfling classes. Aside from that, I've got this thing about stripping down classes to their bare essentials, and the flexible simplicity of the skill system sort of encourages this.

A couple of further ideas I've been considering:

1. Remove the specialist class and simply give all characters a certain number of skill points per level. That way, a fighter could have a sideline in sneakiness or a magic-user could dabble in bushcraft.
2. Remove the cleric class and replace divine magic / favour with a "piety" skill. I don't yet have a clear picture of exactly how this would work, but I'm envisaging some kind of system where characters can pray at shrines in order to receive blessings from saints or deities, which could then be used like spells.

Putting both of those together, one would end up with only two classes: Fighter and Magic-User. I'm not sure if I'd go that far, but it's an interesting idea to think about.